The Covid-19 pandemic and the social distancing that followed have affected all walks of society, also education. In order to keep education running, educational institutions have had to quickly adapt to the situation. This has resulted in an unprecedented push to online learning. Many, including commercial digital learning platform providers, have rushed to provide their support and ‘solutions’, sometimes for free. The Covid-19 pandemic has therefore also created a sellers’ market in ed-tech. This paper employs a critical lens to reflect on the possible problems arising from hasty adoption of commercial digital learning solutions whose design might not always be driven by best pedagogical practices but their business model that leverages user data for profit-making. Moreover, already before Covid-19, there has been increasing critique of how ed-tech is redefining and reducing concepts of teaching and learning. The paper also challenges the narrative that claims, ‘education is broken, and it should and can be fixed with technology’. Such technologization, often seen as neutral, is closely related to educationalization, i.e. imposing growing societal problems for education to resolve. Therefore, this is a critical moment to reflect how the current choices educational institutions are making might affect with Covid-19 education and online learning: Will they reinforce capitalist instrumental view of education or promote holistic human growth? This paper urges educational leaders to think carefully about the decisions they are currently making and if they indeed pave the way to a desirable future of education.
We are increasingly no longer in a world where digital technology and media is separate, virtual, 'other' to a 'natural' human and social life. This has inspired the emergence of a new concept-'the postdigital'-which is slowly but surely gaining traction in a wide range of disciplines including but not limited to the arts (
After several months of personal journey towards accepting that the coronavirus pandemic is real (see Jandrić 2020a, b), in early March, it dawned on me that the pandemic does not need only so-called essential workers. Self-quarantined after returning from abroad weeks before the Croatian government locked down the country, I immediately wrote an editorial for Postdigital Science and Education and argued that 'While doctors, nurses, politicians, food suppliers, and many other brave people self-sacrifice to support our daily survival, this editorial argues that academics have a unique opportunity, and a moral duty, to immediately start conducting in-depth studies of current events.' (Jandrić 2020c: 234) I had no idea how to even approach these studies, yet I had a strong feeling that something needed to be done urgently. So, I just did what I know best and issued calls for 3 different types of Covid-19-related material to be published in Postdigital Science and Education: short testimonies, longer commentary articles, and full-length original articles. I had no idea how much material I would receive, what this material would look like, and what I would do with this material. I just had a deep gut feeling that we are witnessing a unique time in human history, a once-in-a-lifetime event, that needs to be recorded as it unfolds. For better or for worse, I decided to follow that feeling. This general vision, without a clear idea of what I was doing, paved a bumpy road for the development of this collection. On 17 March 2020, I shared the Call for Testimonies on Postdigital Science and Education social network sites and I emailed it to the journal's mailing list. Based on my previous experience with similar calls, I expected to receive 10 to 15 contributions and produce a standard-length collective article aiming at postdigital dialogue (Jandrić et al. 2019) about the pandemic. Yet my call went 'viral', at least for academic standards, and a couple of weeks later, I had more than 50,000 words written by more than 80 authors. So how do I make sense of all that material? My dear friend and Associate Editor of Postdigital Science and Education, Sarah Hayes, came to my rescue. We first tried to make sense of the contributions using critical discourse
This article is a multi-authored experimental postdigital dialogue about postdigital dialogue. Fourteen authors were invited to produce their sections, followed by two author-reviewers who examined the article as a whole. Authors were invited to reflect on Petar Jandric's book Learning in the age of digital reason (2017) or to produce completely new insights. The article also contains a summary of book symposium on Learning in the age of digital reason held at the 2017 American Educational Research Conference (AERA). The authors are tentatively confident that this article produces more knowledge than the arithmetic sum of its constituent parts. However, they are also very aware of its limits and insist that their conclusions are not consensual or homogenous. As traditional forms of research increasingly fail to describe our current reality, they present this article as an experiment and a possible starting point for developing new dialogical research approaches fit for our postdigital reality.
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